James A. Robinson is a British-American political scientist, economist, and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics (together with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson) ?for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.? His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences. Robinson has a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and is a Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogot? between 1994 and 2022. He has published three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), and The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty. He currently holds appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the political science department at the University of Chicago.